Stories from Svogerslev

Tonight we were in the fields, waist deep in grain, and suddenly, thirty metres away there was a young deer, bucking and leaping through the wheat. I yelped "ET RÅDYR" which is how you say it in Danish, and stooped and sprinted along the tractor path, thinking I could catch it up and surprise it. Unfortunately a leaping deer is faster than I am and it got away. Still, it was a beautiful moment, the sky of milk being pierced by a disappearing cardinal sun and the wind mills whipping and our movement making tracks of crushed cereal stalks. It was always gonna be beautiful, but the addition of a solitary leaping deer? I mean, come on.

Also there are hundreds of very very large slugs, often in clumps.





The school we are staying in is peculiar in that it has a Lord of the Rings theme, and has meeting rooms with runes on the wall, and hallways with murals on the walls which depict different bits of the story, kind of like a Catholic church might have depictions of the twelve stations of the cross. At night local kids play on the sloping tin roof and spy on us through the skylight as have our discussions. While exploring the adjacent forest today I found a series of paths which lead to a mini climbing wall in a little clearing in the trees, on which I plan to hang a white sheet, and to which I will run a very very long electrical cord to power a projector and computer and I will take mattresses and couches and citronella lanterns and tea lights in brown paper bags and set up a little outdoor cinema. This I will do in secret and then I will lead the other participants to it in the dark, and we will come to the clearing and they will be shocked and enchanted. There we will sit and we will watch the film Voces Innocentes which is about a very good film about child soldiers in El Salvador and then we will be discuss child soldiers and everybody will be very engaged and interested and even emotionally affected. But shhh, I said it´s a secret.

I leave you with a humorous company logo from the side of a plastic food delivery tray.

On Escaping

Behind the school where we are living, over the little hill and across the road, there is a vast wheat field, the stalks waist high and shimmering yellow. In the middle of it all, three vast turbines, whooshing mechanically, and a tractor path running under their shadows. It’s half past eight, the sun is getting lower on the flat horizon, and we are enjoying the magic hour, the four of us, which is to say me and the three people I like most in this project – Maggie (Sweden), Jo (Canada) and Ghassan (Lebanon). We are lying here, hidden by the sea of crops, feeling good because we have escaped for a little while; we are vagrants, camped out and cautious of farmers with shotguns, we are five minutes from the camp but it feels like we are in a John Steinbeck novel, somewhere in California, or Nebraska, or Saskatchewan. We are giddy with laughter and there are ravens in the sky, and flat white clouds. The stentorian whomping of the turbine blades, the gentle rustle of wheat husks, the glow of the sunset on the faces of these people that I have recently met and recently come to love.

We started phase ‘two’ of the project today, which means that working with the kids in the refugee centre is on hold while we devote time to discussion, research, activities and exploration of the project theme (human, and specifically children’s rights). This does not suit some in the group, those who came here to act, to plunge themselves into the lives of some confused kids with confused futures, to do something for a couple of weeks so as to return to ‘normal’ life feeling as though they have achieved something – who look shocked and somewhat horrified at the suggestion that this could in fact be a learning experience for themselves first and foremost. I guess I understand this almost desperate desire to be of use, to stop talking and start acting, but for me this is in no way the venue for that, and we are not the right people – and I disagree greatly with these people. On the other hand most of us are excited and engaged by the switch into discussions. Having seen first hand the impossible awfulness of the situations of these children I feel like I owe it to them – Burhan from Kosovo, Omar from Iraq, beautiful doe-eyed Shamsa from Somalia – to know as much as possible about everything (every declaration, every policy, every arrogant or ignorant decision) which has led them here. Then I owe it to them to work, with every one of my actions, with every one of my thoughts, with my life, towards change. That this is not a reaction shared by some of the other equally well meaning people I am currently sharing a bedroom with is…interesting to learn.

The last day with all the kids at the centre was the easiest so far in terms of running activities and dealing with the kids – but it was by far the hardest emotionally. I think this is the first time I’ve cried sad tears from watching children laugh and smile – brought to surface by the overhanging realisation that their score has been well and truly set, that we are only masks, smokescreens, three minute long funfair rides, that we are powerless, and that next time I hear of death in Iraq, I will have no idea which of these kids are there now, and which are still trapped in the green, leafy purgatory of Avnstrup.

The other day, in the sunshine, a moment worth sharing: Muna from Somalia was playing djembe (she plays really well), while the other girls (Kurds, Persians, Albanians, Roma girls) clapped and trilled their tongues and sang together the song "Ah Wa Noss" by the Lebanese pop singer Nancy Ajram. I sang along too and attempted to dance, which inspired the Kosovar boys, who busted out some break moves in the long grass. There was a butterfly, and I remembered the name in Danish. The world seemed so small in that moment, and incredibly beautiful, and in that moment, just like in the wheat today, and in the fields of daisies with M and S yesterday, it felt as though escape (from reality, from everything) was really still possible.

Scandinavia: An Introduction

Hello?

For a while now, there's been something wrong. Somehow, somewhere along the line, this blog became something in my mind which it was never meant to be when it started, it outgrew itself and went through some sort of mid-life crisis - it lost shape and energy, its very reason came under question, it grew inert. The need to write began filling me with apprehension, with emptiness, with fear. Once upon a time it was a way to say hello to friends and loved ones around the world, and just express whatever was in my head, or in the streets and skies and hearts and minds around me - but at some point it became something else, it hung above me threateningly, it taunted me, as if saying "you're not good enough anymore. Your writing is not as intelligent, not as beautiful, not as thoughtful as Bec's or Marty's or Patricks. Your photographs are nothing like the brothers Eaton. Your thoughts are repeats, your emotions thin and familiar. They don't want to read about that, not now".

I know this is a stupid way to think. I know that even if it was true, it shouldn't matter, because this is for me, its for my parents, its for my most forgiving and loving friends, its for my children, its for my memory. It's the only way I've ever found by which I actually maintain some sort of commitment to writing - and I must start again now, before I lose this one last medium, before the doubt and paralysis overtakes completely. I must write regularly from here on out - If I can't do it in this six months, when I'm all the way over here, experiencing these things, learning all that I am learning, then something is massively wrong.

I've been meaning to kick off this "new phase" of the blog for a while. I meant to use it to mark the end of my period in Canberra, and to process my quick return to Perth, and to herald my arrival in Scandinavia two weeks ago. But this has been a hard post to write. I've stalled on it again and again, distracted myself just as I've sat down to write. And for whatever reason I needed it first, as a page break, a border, a full stop, a new paragraph. Hopefully with this posted, we can forget about the lapses over the past few months, and I can just start using this more as I always intended it, with entries frequent, imperfect, and likely rambling. This is ok. At least it is better than silence.

Right now I am living in a school in a small village with an unpronounceable name (Svogerslev) which is a few kilometers from the city of Roskilde on the island of Zealand in the nation state of Denmark. I am living here with 24 others from 9 countries, and we are working together with CISV and with the Youth Association of the Danish Red Cross in a refugee asylum center nearby. The families that live here are mostly on their way out - the system has pulled and shunted them around for up to seven years, but their temporary residence visas are about to run out, and they have been denied permanent residence, so they are due to be returned to their countries soon enough. There is despair, and there is pain, and there is depression in this place, especially with the adults and the teenage kids, who remember life before Scandinavia, and understand completely what uncertainty may come next. The younger kids, meanwhile, the ones we are working with, mostly, are left confused, bored and scared. Boys and girls from Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Kosovo float above the grass in the Danish countryside. We spoke earlier in the week to an Iraqi Kurdish guy who had grown up in the Danish asylum seeking system, and had been lucky enough to be able to stay on in the country. We heard about his family being sent a bill to pay for the bullets that the Iraqi government had used to execute his uncle. We heard about the psychological pain his father went through during seven years of imprisonment, and the damage caused to his mother as she tried to get her children out of Iraq and to keep them in Denmark, and to keep them alive. And these were horrible stories to hear, incredible and hard stories, but they have become so real, working with these kids, watching them move and talk and think and play, and doing all these things with them. It is an honor, and it is devastating.

I am blessed too to be working here with some incredible people, with warmth and intelligence and creativity and real, thick, creamy compassion. I invite (actually I implore) you now to read a blog entry written by one of the girls I am doing all this with, Joanna from Canada, who is 20 years old, and very inspiring - and you should read it because she says everything I have been thinking, everything I want to be able to express, and she says it amazingly well. Her blog can be found here: http://ideas-thegrandtour.blogspot.com/

I will try to write every two days or so for the next six months at least. Maybe more. I really hope it will be no less. Right now its the middle of the night and there are still birds chortling and squeaking outside, like this: "chauuuuchooootwitttercheeeechoootweet". There are always birds making these noises, which makes me think that Danes don't need windchimes. Today I sat in the grass and planned pirate activities and made daisy chains and we fit three grown people on the tyre flying fox. This is the beginning of the Scandinavianised version of the Standard Line Delivery System. Velkomme til.

An Echo.

It’s a slow and measured ride. A little after sunset, the smell of wood fires, the scratch and shuffle of possums. The chilled air bites your cheeks, your knuckles, your nose. Scattered milk crates, a barking dog, patches of gravel on the path left from flooding during the hail storm months ago. Bus stop graffiti reveals Casey to be a Big Fat Slut. You cross the dew licked grass. The moon is full, and glows like a future behind the dark lump of Mount Ainslie. A carefully placed bunny-hop up the curb and you’re out the front of the house, cresting at the apex of the shallow U shaped crescent, hidden by the line of conical hedge trees which are exactly the sort you can buy in hobby shops to line the country roads of your model train diorama. Around the dark buses, through the chain link gate and past the old bath tub and little piles of car parts. Through the bead curtain hanging in the backdoor frame. This is what we call home.

And it’s definitely a lonely town.


But here I am and here I am. Canberra, our nation’s brave and bright political beacon, our majestic capital. A city kinda like Pauly Shore or Vanilla Ice – a joke that never fades. Already half way through my first (and possibly only – inshallah!) stint here. Steel-trapped behind the computer desk, reading, typing, thinking, procrastinating – procrastination never feels so bad when you’ve got nothing better to rush off to anyway. Stretch it out, make it last right up to the hour it’s due. See what I care. I’ve got Allen’s snakes, I’ve got the new Modest Mouse, I’ve got Facebook messages from ex-lovers. Out there there’s nothing but a couple hundred up-collared jocks stumbling liquored outta Mooseheads, humming Khe Sahn, on their way to the $2.50 pizza slice counters. Beyond that? Silence and cold and darkness, and somewhere among it all, my bedroom.

I exaggerate of course. There are warm, sunny days with windsurfers on Lake Burley Griffin, and birds flicking from orange and yellow trees. And there are people I have here as my friends, and they are good people, despite not exactly making my desert island shortlist. The key people in my life right now, for your information, are as follows:

"Giacomo"
He is Italian, from near the French border. He likes wearing his sweaters over his shoulders, smart-casual style. He has a particular way of speaking that often includes the use of the phrases “It’s a good/crappy thing, actually, at the end of the day” and “oh PERfect, well done, well done”. I will be studying with him in Oslo for the second half of the year, also. He once stole a 7 disc set of Dawson’s Creek Series 5, but felt guilty and returned it to the store, offered to pay for it, and was arrested. He represented himself in court and walked away without a criminal record. He has trouble with getting the ladies because they all think he is “such a good friend” and “such a nice guy”, and we all know how sexy that is. Little do they know that he’s actually a sexist, Eurocentic (bridging on racist), porn-collecting, smack-shootin' motherfucker. You’re missing out, girls.

Yui
She is from Thailand. She is here on an Ausaid scholarship, meaning the Australian government pay her the same amount to study here as they give about seven local undergraduates – ie: she actually gets enough to live on. She’s pretty much the cutest thing since Sanrio and I’ll admit here that our friendship kicked off when she was chosen in the early days as the closest thing to a crush I was ever likely to develop in the course (and indeed in Canberra) and thus approached her with invites to social occasions. Since then its all gotten pretty severely platonic (thus rendering the whole crush-scene distinctly wastelandic) although Micky and I joke often with her about both of us being somewhat head-over-heels, hence our new (hilarious!) project – http://yayforyui.blogspot.com . She likes cake and German boys.

Hugh
He is from Perth. He is friends with Jim Mitchell! He has a pretty girlfriend called Claire, and surfs, and wrote a honours thesis about Aceh. When he doesn’t want to discuss something he gets very obvious in his vagueness. He doesn’t like discussing the affairs of others, or about his honours thesis, or about skinny waitresses with lisps who have mad crushes on him. He’s a really lovely guy, but he lives out in Upper Downer, which is a very inconvenient place to get to by bike, so he’s consequently notoriously antisocial.

(photo to come)

Jason
He is from Taiwan. He is the most fashionable male in the course, as voted by me and Yui. He works at the Taiwanese embassy, or whatever they call it given that they are not allowed to have an embassy. He is actually a special operative spy intent on the immediate destruction of China. He cooks a powerful Korean dumpling, too.

*
I’m gonna post more, I promise. This is the start of a new era for the Standard Line Delivery Corporation. Enough stalling with illusions of literary birds nests – this is supposed to be a diary goddamn, something to belt out when I’m alone and cold, and to read back on someday when I’m alone and cold and, also, old. For now, to the two or three of you who still bother checking this thing for updates, goodnight, and may your dreams hold rickshaws filled with soft fruit and slender Vietnamese women in milk white ao dai.

Sturm Und Drang

(all photos are not by me, but are, rather, taken from these four flickr sites - (1) (2) (3) (4) -
you can see many more such photos at these sites)

“Oh, and by the way,” Sarah had told me, “Jane said you can only stay with them in Canberra if you can bring some rains with you. They’re desperate after such a long drought.”

Last night, I was sitting on my bed, slowly absorbing a dry and drawn-out essay on self-education and evaluation in humanitarian aid organisations during situations of crisis, when, all around, the rumbling started. Not at all like the usual punctuated claps of thunder, the approaching storm sounded like a great stampede of wildebeests, like the catastrophic build-up of angry electricity, like the centre of a oval-sized swarm of bees. There were bursts of lightning, slashing across the city centre, and there was the growl of wind coming from all directions. But for a while there was no rain. For a while there was only the terrible noises, an approaching war.

But then it came, the rain. And with it came the hailstones, pounding the trees and the soil and the windows; rocks the size of icecubes. I opened the door a little - ice flecked in through the crack and scattered onto the carpet. It was ferocious - I closed the door again and a burst of excitement shuddered through my body as I jumped onto the bed and snuck under the covers.

It continued. The drains were blocked by hail, and the yard flooded. I went to the door again, turned on the light outside, trying to assess the carnage from the safety of my flat. Where my feet had touched the carpet, wet patches appeared. From under my door, rain had been pouring in, the rubber-bottomed carpet was floating. My room was flooded.

I lifted up the VCR, books and clothes which were on the floor and put them on my bed. I slammed towels and the bath mat up against the door to stop more seeping in. I rang Ed, who ran down and got in through the shed, into the flat. The main house was leaking everywhere, he said, rain was pouring through the roof. We ran outside. Ted was up on the roof, clearing hailstones out of gutters - Jane grabbed a mop to help make the water flow efficiently into the storm drains, Ed and I threw rags and tarps at the base of the door to try and clog up the openning. We ripped drainpipes off the walls to make it flow faster, we clambered up to try and divert the flow of water to other areas of the roof, we dashed through troughs of water in the garden up to our ankles. All the while, hail stones pounded us from every direction.

Then it stopped. The wind slowly died down. Everywhere there was the sound of sirens - police sirens, ambulance sirens, house and car alarms, wailing like this was some other type of air raid. Everywhere the ground was a pot pouri of white and green - huge drifts of ice banked right up to the house, flecked throughout with torn leaves and broken branches. A thin mist snuck across the suburbs.

I pulled up the carpet, and in my soaked socks I started mopping the concrete floor underneath.

Today, the university is closed, due to water damage. Classes are cancelled, shops are shut. People in the streets are shovelling the huge carpets of ice that coat the paths and gardens, creating mini mountains of hailstones. The city centre's streets are covered with ripped leaves and drifts of ice. I have never experienced anything remotely like this.

And they say it might happen again this evening.

(Special note to those in the northern hemisphere - I would like to remind you that: (1) this is summer, and (2) this is Australia. Yeah, holy shit.)